Tuesday - August 19, 2008

More .45-60 Blogging

Click each picture in this post to open up a much bigger version in a new window.

Part 1:A Fun Little Gun Project.
Part 2:The Two Cent Machine Shop.

Well the “2¢ Machine Shop” didn’t quite work out. I set everything up on the drill press, put in a case and started filing away at it. Just about no brass was trimmed off. I only had to take 4 or 5 thousandths of an inch. You would think you could do that with ease. I used a medium rough mill file. I used a fine triangular file. I even tried using a sharp cold chisel. Result? Almost nothing. Well, why not? Um, maybe because the pennies and the epoxy underneath them are too thick? Hmm, possible; let’s try it again with some dimes. I know that dimes are a bit too thin, so maybe with a layer of glue they’ll come out right. So I tried that one. That didn’t work either. Ok, I got some brass to come off, but it didn’t seem to be enough. No matter how hard I pushed down, or how much I kept the files moving so they wouldn’t clog up, I still wound up with rims over 0.062” thick. And I wanted 0.057”, or at least under 0.060”. So this “male” solution wasn’t doing it. Let’s try a “female” solution: instead of some spacers protruding up, lets cut a channel down. And so I did. And at first it seemed to work. But then it didn’t. The pine wood was getting a cartridge case head sized dent spun into it. So let’s try a harder wood ... here’s a nice piece of red oak. And let’s cut a precision edge this time, using a router table adjustable down to under 0.001”. Cool! Massive power tools are so much fun to play with!

But that didn’t work either. AGGRAVATION!!!! The spinning cases, which were really only just contacting the wood jigs, kept spinning a dent down into the surface. Finally I surrendered and got out some stainless steel feeler gauges and put them underneath. Hey, stainless steel. Harder than brass, right? Shouldn’t wear at all. Shouldn’t allow the cases to keep cutting a dent. And they should bring the case heads up a precise amount! Problem solved? Like hell. They didn’t do diddly. Even when I used a feeler gauge several times thicker than what should have done the job, I still could not get the brass to thin down hardly at all.

Ok, this isn’t entirely true. I did manage to thin several cases with each tool’s implementation. But after just a couple cases the tools wouldn’t work any more. And that was really frustrating. And I do not know why this happened. So, between using a tool, filing down some case heads, the tools ceasing to work, going “huh??”, designing a new tool, building it ... lather rinse, repeat ... more than a full day went by. Finally I just threw up my hands and quit.

But an hour or so later I was back. Son of a bitch, I could do each case by hand in about 2 minutes and had done so. So I went back to that. Mount the case in the sizing die, with the sizing die in a high speed hand drill. Hold the file and the case head in one hand while the other hand works the drill trigger. Veerrrrrreeemm! When the brass got too hot to touch I let it cool. And each case took about 2 minutes. Son of a Beach. And they all came out right about at 0.057-0.061”. Dubble Beach! Of course, they weren’t pretty. The file jumps around a bit and scratches the case walls sometimes. But these should be good enough for now.

Next step was shortening the length of them. I drilled a 1/2” hole in a block of wood, and sanded it down until it gave me the proper thickness for the length of the body of the cases. Next I pressed a case in from the back, and buzzed it up against a sanding disk. This took the brass down in a flash. In hindsight, I should have mounted a steel fender washer to the front of the block, as the block got a little sanded off during “production” and a couple cases came up a bit short. No biggy really, but that would be a smarter tool. For next time. If there is a next time!

Final trimming and cleanup was done back here on my case trimmer, and with the aid of an oversize chamfering tool. The little chamferer that everyone has is just barely up to cases that are 0.480” wide at the mouths. Better to use the big one that’s designed for the .50 BMG. These gizmos last several lifetimes. A couple of gentle spins in some 0000 steel wool cleans up the ends real nice so they don’t snag anything. Like bullets. Or scratch expensive rifles as they go through the loading mechanism. To that end, I also softened the edge of the rim with a sharpening stone, but I didn’t get a picture. I only have so many hands you know! You want to do this, because the milled brass edge is quite sharp. See the band-aid on my finger in the picture? Guess why! I think it’s time to just Man Up and find somebody with a small precision lathe.

Now it’s off to the doc to see if each and every case fits. Then it’s time to figure out some loads from my small selection of gun powders. Ha, just teasing. I’ve got 3 good ones figured out already. Save that for the next post.

Yeah, in theory the .45-60 is a bottleneck cartridge. That’s because it was built to shoot .454” diameter bullets. But the new Uberti seems to be made to shoot .458” bullets. We’ll verify that one too before loading up any ammo. That’s an easy but frightening process. Oil up the barrel and them hammer a soft lead bullet all the way through it. I’ve got a 7/16” steel rod that’s perfect for the job. Bashing away at a chunk of steel in a $1000 rifle. Yup, frightening. 

Posted by Drew458     on 08/19/2008 at 03:35 PM   
Filed Under: • Guns and Gun Control •  
• Comments (2) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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